CommunicAsia 99, one of the major international telecommunication exhibitions in the Asia-Pacific region, was held from June 22 to 25, 1999, at the Singapore Expo, a newly-opened, 30,000sqm international exhibition site.

About 900 exhibitors from 39 countries worldwide participated in it, including group pavilions from 11 countries. As the Singapore government fully supported this exhibition, Mr. Yeo Cheow Tong, Minister for Communications and Information Technology, made a congratulatory speech at the opening ceremony and then visited major exhibition booths. Nearly 30,000 people, one-third of them from abroad, visited the exhibition.

The PHS MoU Group participated in the exhibition under the motto of “PHS - The second era of growth has begun,” and exhibited the latest PHS development and its service status in Japan.
PHS service had been sluggish in Japan for a while. However, the increased subscriptions number in April was considered to be an indication of a turn toward another growth. “Moji-Denwa (character telephone),” location information, and many other new services were launched by PHS operators. The commercial 64kbit/s mobile data communications service was launched for the first time in the world. “Visual Phone,” which was also the world’s first commercial mobile phone with digital camera, and many other new models were introduced as well.

Those new models drew the attention of many visitors, who earnestly asked the explainer, “Where and how can I buy them?” The first words uttered by some visitors were “I heard PHS was gone.” But when they looked over the booth, they realized that the news of PHS being gone was untrue.

Four PHS MoU Group members - ArrayComm, Inc., Fujitsu Ltd., Matsushita Communication Industrial Co., Ltd. and NEC Corp. - joined this exhibition and displayed PHS-WLL, PBX/PHS systems and other products.
Mr. Yoshiki Chika, Senior Manager of DDI Tokyo Pocket Telephone Inc. (DDI-P), delivered a presentation entitled “PHS - The second era of growth has begun.” The seminar was so successful that the question-and-answer session continued in another room even after the seminar.

“We have expanded coverage by adaptive array antenna, portable repeater, etc. and have improved the mobility so significantly as to reduce hand-over time from nearly 2 seconds to less than 0.5 second. Our goal is to provide mobility similar to that of cellular,” Mr. Chika emphasized. “We have launched various new services that have been supported by the advantageous features of PHS, such as P-Mail, telemetering, location information services, etc.”

“Our subscribers are increasing and we now have more stable users than before. Generally there are six mobile operators in each region, three PHS operators and three cellular operators. In Tohoku and Hokkaido regions, for example, only two operators - one cellular and one PHS operator (DDI-P) - have achieved profit, and the remaining four operators, including two cellular operators, all made losses in fiscal year 1998. It means that cellular may lose money while a PHS operation has a possibility of becoming profitable, depending upon how it’s managed.”
He concluded, “We will launch a 64kbit/s data communications service this summer, and will offer a 128kbit/s service in the year 2000, which will be able to compete with W-CDMA service in terms of efficiency and cost performance. We believe that PHS has the potential of enhancing 4G mobile communications.”